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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



Plea for the Gospel. 



GEORGE D. "HERRON, D.D., 

AUTHOR OF " THE LARGER CHRIST," " THE MESSAGE OF JESUS TO MEN 
OF WEALTH." 



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NEW YORK: 46 East Fourteenth St. 

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 

BOSTON: 100 Purchase Street. 



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WASHINGTON 



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Copyright, 1892, 
By T. Y. CROWELL & CO. 



C. J. Peters & Son, 

Type-setters and Electrotypers, 

145 High Street, Boston. 



I DEDICATE THIS PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL TO 
MY WIFE, 

JSarg lEberfjarti fgerron, 

WFIO FIAS BEEN TO ME A LIVING CONSCIENCE. 



PREFACE. 



These four sermons were prepared to preach 
to preachers. "The Peril of the Church " and 
" The Opportunity of the Church " were deliv- 
ered before clerical unions in western cities. 
"The Reality of Faith" and "The Faith 
that Overcometh the World" were preached 
before state ecclesiastical associations. Frag- 
ments of these sermons have been widely 
published and discussed, and many calls have 
been made for their publication in this per- 
manent form. This call has been emphasized 
by the interest awakened by the publication of 
four sermons, a year ago, under the title of 
" The Larger Christ." 

The burden of that book is the burden of 
this. The revelation of the sovereign love of 
Christ as the law of all human life is the 
thought which lies at the heart of each dis- 



VI PREFACE. 

course, accounting for whatever repetition of 
expression, or exaggeration of emphasis, the 
critic may find. The assertion of the cross as 
the eternal principle of all divine and human 
action, not simply the accident of sin, seems 
to me the imperative of the hour. This one 
thing I do. I can find no other work. Every- 
thing I touch resolves itself into the message 
of the cross. So I accept this message as my 
intellectual and moral portion, rejoicing in the 
larger and more comprehensive word which 
other voices will speak. 

These sermons are not put forth as dogma, 
but as life, fragmentary, indeed, but yet life. 
May the living Christ bless them as food to 
some hungry souls in this day of human need 
and divine opportunity ! 

G. D. H. 

First Congregational Church. 
Burlington, Io., June, 1892. 



CONTENTS. 



I. PAGE 

Unconsecrated Service the Peril of the Church i 

II. 

The Opportunity of the Church 33 

III. 

The Reality of Faith 57 

IV. 

The Faith that overcometh the World ... 85 



I. 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE THE PERIL OF 
THE CHURCH. 



A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 



i. 

UNCONSECRATED SERVICE THE 
PERIL OF THE CHURCH. 

And it came to pass on the way at the lodging place, that 
the Lord met him, and sought to kill him. — Ex. iv. 24. 

It is a strange incident in the life of Moses 
that is thus briefly and obscurely stated. From 
the beginning of his career Moses had been 
driven about with the sense of a divine compul- 
sion, his life taken from his own disposal, his 
ways and times other than his own choosing. 
Early called to be the deliverer of the Hebrew 
people from their Egyptian bondage, he had 
been driven from his task, into an exile of forty 
years, at his first attempt to fulfil his mission. 
After the long waiting, — doubtless through 
alternating periods of hope and despair, — God 
saw that the man was sufficiently humbled by 
3 



4 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

failure and purified by suffering to begin his 
work. By the time the cup of Israel's affliction 
was full, the years of divine discipline had added 
to the natural strength of Moses' character 
something of the wisdom and the patience of 
the power of God. So, while one day tending 
the flocks of his Midianite father-in-law, God 
spoke to him from the burning bush, bidding 
him go down into Egypt and lead forth the 
chosen people to their promised land. After 
some halting and arguing with God, Moses 
took his family and started for Egypt, accord- 
ing to the divine command. Yet, on the way, 
while hastening along the path in which God 
himself had set the leader's feet, God met him 
and sought to kill him. This is the simple and 
inspired way of saying that something hap- 
pened to Moses, something came into or upon 
his life, that threatened to destroy it, and defeat 
his divinely directed plans for delivering Israel. 
And what else could this arrested journey, this 
mortal struggle for life and faith and wisdom, 
— what else could it be than the overpowering 
and consecrating presence of the Lord ? Hold 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 5 

on, Moses ; wait a little ; think a while ; under- 
stand yourself ; look at me. Either you must 
make a complete and trustful surrender of your- 
self to me, so that I may work in you, and you 
may work with me, unhindered by any self-will 
or unbelief, or you must get out of my way. It 
is better you should die than that you should 
take up my work with unconsecrated hands. 
To this end have I brought this upon you, for 
this reason have I permitted this thing to come 
into your life, that I may render you self-help- 
less, leaving you no choice but death or irrevo- 
cable self-surrender. Choose now, Moses, with 
a choice that shall be eternal. 

It may be the Lord appeared to Moses just 
as he appears to all of us in those great epochal 
moments when we lie very low under his hum- 
bling hand, terribly conscious that nowhere in 
the universe is there sustaining strength save 
in the healing touch of his infinite life ; no- 
where any hope save in the reviving breath of 
his infinite mercy. If we would receive him, 
the Lord would meet us in every disappoint- 
ment and affliction, calling us to a sincerer 



6 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

self-examination, helping us to a purer and 
completer consecration ; he would make every 
sorrow the sanctuary in which we should enter 
into a closer fellowship with his life. It is true, 
we ought to see opportunities for a deeper and 
more unbroken intimacy with God in our joys, 
as well as perils and griefs ; but we see the 
heavens best in the night. 

It costs God much to make a man ; it costs a 
man to have God make him. Out of the low- 
est depths of self-abasement God lifts men to 
the greatest heights. Every man called to do a 
great work has been baffled in his efforts until 
the reins of his purposes were delivered into 
the hand mightier than his own; or he has been 
kept humble by relentless memories of sin, and 
baptized with sorrows that would consume his 
life if he abode not in the secret place of the 
Most High ; or he has been led under the des- 
potism of passions that would become demoniac 
if not hallowed upon the altar of a perfect sacri- 
fice. From the poverty and bondage of a self- 
life into the unsearchable riches and infinite 
freedom of the divine life there is a vast wilder- 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. J 

ness of experience, tracked only by paths of 
fearless faith ; and few there be that find them. 
Those who find their way from the old life into 
the new have left behind them wasted years, 
and the wrecks of wicked hopes that once 
seemed divine. It seems as though human 
self-will compels God to lose immense quanti- 
ties of the strongest and purest lives, in order 
to save some precious fragments to invest with 
an altogether divine quality. Again and again, 
at the point of death, are the messengers of 
God delivered from the peril of unconsecrated 
service ere they are allowed to proceed upon 
their redemptive errands. 

Yet God counts no price too great to pay for 
a man. The human character that is eternal 
has been wrought out by the suffering of God. 
By the sorrow of his heart has God chiselled 
out his image in the soul of man. By the blood 
of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the 
world are we cleansed from the sins of time. 
But God reckons not the cost ; he spared not 
his Son ; he quenches not his sufferings. And 
without stint God lavishes suffering upon every 



8 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

son, who thereby learns obedience. It is worth 
God's while. There is no sight so sublime, no 
beauty so enthralling, no influence so subtle in 
operation and measureless in results, no power 
so resistless, as that of a human life wholly 
consecrated to God. The most splendid and 
authoritative institutions of men are toys com- 
pared to the pure-hearted child of God who has 
seen the divine meanings of things, and yielded 
all his powers to the absolute sway of the eter- 
nal realities. He who is great enough to put 
the kingdoms of the world and all their glory 
behind him, rather than forfeit one tittle of his 
birthright as a son of God ; who falters not in 
the face of the darkest mysteries of life, and 
drinks deep of its sorrows that he may have 
fellowship with God ; who dares be led from 
day to day by his divine instincts, without 
anxiety for the morrow ; whose communion 
with God is so close and unbroken that prayer 
is his soul's atmosphere ; whose religious knowl- 
edge is not the traditions of men, but the word 
of God in his inmost being ; who speaks what 
he hears God speak, and does the works he 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 9 

sees God doing; — such a man, soever humble 
though he be, is the real maker of civilizations, 
the divine reformer of nations, the eternal 
worker of righteousness. God has provided 
and man has discovered no greater force to 
work out the redemption of the race than that 
of the wholly unselfish life that seeketh not its 
own. It is not with institutions and formulas, 
so much as with men, that God unfolds his own 
life in the development of humanity — men in 
whom he can have his loving and righteous 
way ; men with a faith as insuppressible as 
light ; men who are incarnations of his draw- 
ing sacrificial love. 

To those who value what they can see and 
own more than what is unseen and eternal this 
does not always seem to be true. Such as 
regard the social respectabilities above Christli- 
ness of life may delight to honor the selfish 
man who accepts the church's creeds and ob- 
serves the commercial moralities. The church 
may invite to high places men of renowned 
integrity and conspicuous philanthropy, who 
long since have exchanged the hand of brother- 



10 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

hood with which God created them for the 
polished hand and steely grasp of covetousness. 
Yet all service not rendered in the divine and 
living Christ-way is but the service of death. 
It is the unconsecrated service which is the 
peril and infidelity of the church. 

The church may appear to be growing in 
aggressiveness and influence in other than the 
meek and lowly ways of Christ, without being 
rejected by the proud, and acquainted with the 
grief of the stricken and oppressed ; without 
being smitten with the sorrows, and wounded 
with the transgressions of the straying sheep ; 
without pouring out its soul unto death in 
manifesting the saving love of God for a lost 
world. But when the church is holding con- 
ventions and congratulating itself on its prog- 
ress, it may be changing into a sepulchre of 
death, full of the bones of religious bigotry and 
the corruption of social pride. It may be 
conquering the world in its fancy, while in 
reality it is being conquered by the world. It 
may have become so servile in its deference to 
the customs of a pagan society and an atheistic 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. II 

market, so blind and bitter in its defence of 
dead forms of religious truth, as to be as inca- 
pable of seeing its actual condition as death is 
incapable of seeing life. The world may have 
flattered and bribed it into the surrender of 
the power to discern its own spiritual degrada- 
tion, its moral emaciation, its sad departure 
from the spirit and life of its Lord. 

The Jewish church had reached this state 
when the Son of God appealed to it for the 
recognition of his Messianic authority. There 
were saintly men and women in the temple and 
synagogues, praying for the redemption, and 
waiting for the consolation, of Israel. The 
temple and its services had been the object of 
God's particular care through long and weary 
centuries. Often had God visited and cor- 
rected his people Israel. They were the 
treasurers of the oracles of God. But God 
cares for the sacredest institutions no more 
than they are his instruments for making men. 
When they begin to exist for themselves more 
than for their mission, then God destroys them. 
The Son of man found the Jewish church so 



12 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

hopelessly fixed in its own rather than God's way 
of salvation, that its destruction was essential to 
the redemption of the world. Instead of being, 
as its rulers thought, indispensable to the 
kingdom of God, it confronted the kingdom's 
coming with unyielding resistance. The Phari- 
sees and scribes, many of them men of pro- 
found religious culture and eminent piety, were 
the only utterly abhorrent and apparently in- 
curable souls that Jesus met in his ministry. 
It was a case of consecration or death that 
confronted the Jews; and they chose death, 
not knowing the day of their visitation, wilfully 
blind to their eternal opportunity. The peril 
of unconsecrated service plunged Christendom 
into the blood and anguish of the Reformation, 
when the eyes of Savonarola and Wickliffe, 
Luther and Zwingli, were open to see, and 
their mouths open to hail, the coming of Christ 
in a diviner order of history. On the pages of 
Catholic records were lustrous deeds, and the 
names of devoted martyrs who loved not their 
lives unto death. Before the heroic purity and 
passionate consecration of Bernard of Clairvaux 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 13 

and Francis of Assissi, and the self-sacrifice of 
a great multitude whom no man can number, 
we may well be dumb at the wonder of their 
lives and the shame of our own poor zeal and 
faith ; when we can match their loyalty to 
Christ, then we may have a right to point out 
their superstition and folly. But the church, 
withal, was in God's way. As an institution it 
had come to exist for its own sake, making 
religion the disgust of intelligence, the suspi- 
cion of moral honesty, and the protection of 
blackest crimes. It had juggled with righteous- 
ness, and distorted the truth, until the world 
was well-nigh ceasing to believe in the reality 
of righteousness or the existence of truth. 
Better the church should have been swept from 
the face of the earth than have remained con- 
secrated to selfish ends ! Those who came out 
from the church were its saviours. The birth 
of Protestantism was the salvation of Catholi- 
cism. Only by some measure of consecration, 
somewhere within itself, could the church uni- 
versal escape dissolution. Unconsecrated ser- 
vice always carries in it the germs of the 
servant's death. 



14 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

But the Reformation did not restore the 
gospel. It did not liberate it from the tyranny 
of Roman legalism, or clear it of the fungus 
of Greek philosophy. Few pulpits have any 
intelligent conception of what Christianity really 
is ; that which the mass of Protestant preachers 
proclaim is not the gospel. Christ came into 
the world not so much to found a religion, as to 
reveal the religion hidden beneath all the debris 
of discarded beliefs and abandoned forms of 
worship. He taught that religion was pure 
and simple life ; life with God, life free from all 
fear of nature or distrust of God, life rich with 
the fulness of human fellowships. It was life 
as sweet and joyous and unaffected in its rela- 
tion to God, as that of the little child to the 
loving parent ; a life of whole-hearted surrender 
to Christ's way of living, Christ's way of think- 
ing, Christ's way of working ; a life of personal 
and direct contact with God in Christ, without 
the intervention of rituals, priests, or creeds ; a 
life that could joyously endure the loss of all 
worldly favors and material possessions for the 
sake of realizing its divine childhood, and bring- 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 15 

ing others into the knowledge and glory of that 
childhood. To give men this sonship, Christ 
came, himself the resurrection of the divine 
life in man — which is religion — from the ruins 
of ages of distrust, idolatry, and disobedience. 
He rescued this divine life of fellowship with 
God and brotherhood with man from the do- 
minion of selfishness, wounded and bleeding, 
corrupt and deformed, as the life was, and 
healed it with the balm of infinite mercy, and 
gave it back to man. The gospel was God's 
good news that the divinely human life could 
be lived ; that whereas in times past ceremonies 
and systems had been necessary because of the 
blindness of human unbelief and the darkness 
of human understanding, the time was now 
come when men, through Christ, could have 
immediate access unto the Father. Christ, in 
his loving life and sacrificial death, revealed the 
forgiveness and mercy, the gracious power of 
the Father's love. After the cross, men could 
have no excuse for doubting the love of God ; 
after the ascension of Christ and his return in 
the Spirit there was no excuse for abiding in 



1 6 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

unrighteousness. God was no Jupiter or Caesar. 
He made no exactions concerning the past. 
His love needed no bribing. His vengeance 
was satisfied with man's repentance. It was 
the prodigal who had gone away from the 
Father, not the Father away from the prodigal. 
The blood of Calvary was the witness and 
pledge of God's unchanging friendship for man. 
Then Christ revealed to men how they might 
be the children of their Father, sons of God, by 
being like him. This is the meaning of the 
Sermon on the Mount. God is good ; God is 
forgiving unto the uttermost ; God loves those 
who hate him, blesses those who curse, bestows 
his favors on the false and unjust, suffers in be- 
half of those whose sins are an abomination in 
his eyes. Therefore, be like God and you will 
be his children. Follow me ; live as I live ; be 
as I am ; trust your lives to my leadership ; do 
the works you see me do ; eat my bread, drink 
my drink ; make my righteousness yours ; be 
natural like the lily, like the little child ; be 
spiritual, living as I live, in the light of an 
immediate vision of God. This way of living 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. \*J 

is not hard ; this burden of love for my broth- 
ers is not grievous ; this yoke of my Father's 
will is easy ; I walk in no darkness. Follow 
me ; then you will walk in the light in which I 
walk ; you will have the cross to bear I bear, 
and my mission of redemption through sacrifice 
will be yours ; but you will have the peace 
that makes me strong, the joy that overflows 
my life, and the love for men by which I glorify 
my Father in their eyes. 

This was the gospel. This was the faith 
that was delivered to the apostles. It was the 
good news of forgiveness; the joyful tidings 
that the world was redeemed ; the gift of a 
power to work righteousness ; the revelation 
of God as the Father of man, and of man as 
the child of the Father. Every vestige of a 
veil between man and God was torn away ; no 
conditions, no opinions, were put between 
them, save repentance and faith. They were 
not asked to believe anything about God ex- 
cept that he was good and forgiving, and would 
give them his own power to be good and for- 
giving, if they would repent of their sins, and 



1 8 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

take up the Christ-life of obedient faith. In 
the joy of this simple gospel of redemption the 
apostles went forth, empowered with triumph- 
ant righteousness, on jubilant feet of peace, to 
conquer the world for God. The like of their 
glorious faith and mighty works had never 
been seen before, and has rarely been seen 
since. Christ had overcome the world. It 
was not the devil's world, but God's world. 

Soon Christianity came in contact with 
Greek philosophy. The gospel was too simple 
for the Greeks ; they would adopt it on a philo- 
sophic basis. I do not believe, with Dr. Edwin 
Hatch, that the Sermon on the Mount is the 
centre of Christianity, or that conduct is its 
basis. Christianity is a life, a divine incarna- 
tion. Christianity is the life of God in man, 
revealed in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, tlie 
cross its basic principle. But I do believe, with 
Dr. Hatch, that the Greeks changed Christi- 
anity from a message of righteousness into a 
theology. They shifted the seat of religious 
judgment from character to opinion, exalting 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 19 

dogma above life. They grafted into the gos- 
pel a philosophic Trinity of which the apos- 
tles had never heard. Then Christianity grap- 
pled with civil Romanism, and the empire was 
finally converted into a great ecclesiastical 
structure, and Christianity became a despotic 
government, instead of simple life with God. 
God's fatherhood became a Caesarhood. Christ 
the Redeemer and elder brother of men be- 
came a successful pleader at the bar of an 
Infinite Judge, in a court of abstract and unreal 
justice; a judge who had nothing to do with 
the reality of love. Instead of being received 
as a revelation of God, Christ has since been 
presented to men as a protection from God. 
Divine and great, beyond all reckoning, was the 
work of the reformers. But there remains a 
greater work to be done. There has been 
a reformation : the work that remains is a 
restoration of Christianity ; an emancipation 
of the gospel from baneful bondage to the 
Greeks, who have fettered its freedom and 
bruised its life through all the centuries of 
its progress ; a deliverance of Christianity from 



20 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

the Romans, who have corrupted our very lan- 
guage with their unvital legalism of thought ; 
whose law, Hegel says, makes a definition of 
humanity impossible. 

The time has come when the church must be 
started tcpon a new career — a career that will 
give back Christianity to Christendom, and re- 
store the faith of the apostles to a waiting and 
expectant world. From the prison-house of 
churchly selfishness, from the bonds of dog- 
matic theology, the gospel must be set free, 
or there will arise a new Protestantism. In 
the problems of our day Christ comes to call 
the church to a more comprehensive mission. 
Except the church be born again, and a heart of 
flesh take the place of its heart of pride, it can- 
not see the kingdom of God, which is pressing 
in upon it from the future. To this work God 
now calls the church to consecrate, yea, per- 
haps to sacrifice, its freshest thought, its most 
passionate devotion, its bravest hearts, its 
strongest lives, that the unsearchable riches 
of Christ may be poured afresh upon an impov- 
erished world, and all men be made to see what 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 2T 

is the dispensation of the mystery which from 
all ages hath been hid in God, waiting for the 
manifestation of his Son and the preparation of 
the earth for a regenerated society, a heavenly 
civilization. To this end must these be dedi- 
cated, or the church will perish like the temple, 
or be rent like Rome. The Spirit calls upon 
the church to furnish prophetic souls who will 
feel the anger of the Infinite Love against the 
covetousness which has betrayed Christ to be 
crucified at the hands of mammon. There is a 
divine inconsistency that drives the prophets of 
larger truth beyond the realm of logic and 
opinion into the sphere of infinite liberty, 
where the Spirit utters through them the 
thoughts of God — these the church needs, 
for these the churchless multitudes wait, to 
lead them through the trial hour that is com- 
ing upon the whole earth. The church must 
raise up men who will obey the Spirit's voice, 
or it must get out of God's way. For what 
cares God for churches, if they obstruct the 
march of the divine purposes ? 

Do not think I would detract any honor from 



22 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

the innumerable company of saints and mar- 
tyrs, scholars and missionaries, who by their he- 
roic lives of service have gathered the glory of 
God about our Protestant Christianity, and have 
made the race rich with their sacrifices. These 
cannot be too highly honored. But we truly 
honor the brave and good who have been faith- 
ful in the great crises of the past, and broken 
the old bonds, and pioneered the race's way 
into larger futures, by being ourselves true and 
fearless in welcoming the new life and meeting 
the fateful crises of our day of opportunity. 
We never dishonor the truth and faith of the 
past so much as when we try to make them the 
defence of our own stupidity and cowardice. 

We know, when we consider the matter intel- 
ligently and honestly, that Christianity is not 
fulfilling its mission of establishing the right- 
eousness of God, as it is defined in the 
Sermon on the Mount and revealed in the 
incarnation, and by the cross, as the basis of 
human society. The world is conquering the 
church, at this moment, as truly as the church 
is conquering the world. The church itself 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 2$ 

would regard the attempt to realize the pro- 
phetic and apostolic vision of a new earth 
as not only hopeless lunacy, but a danger- 
ous and disreputable movement towards the 
disruption of society. There is nothing 
which the vested interests of conservative 
Protestantism resent so much as the king- 
dom of God, which is the brotherhood of 
man. The world knows the church is failing ; 
that it has become a secular more than a Chris- 
tian institution. The divine common-sense of 
man discerns a difference between the Christi- 
anity of Christ and the Christianity of the 
modern church which cannot be reconciled. 
The world of doubt believes that the gospel, if 
emancipated from philosophy and actually prac- 
tised, would cure all the ills and solve all the 
problems of society. There is more vital faith 
in much of the scepticism and heresy of our 
day than in a great deal of what we call ortho- 
doxy. There is more hunger for righteousness 
in the unrest that is slowly gathering into 
mighty storms on the horizon of human hope 
than in the self-satisfaction and religious com- 



24 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

placency of the church. The children of dark- 
ness are seeing the signs of the times more 
clearly than the children of light. Again is 
God hiding his mighty purposes from the wise 
and prudent, and revealing them unto babes. 
We need to ask ourselves earnestly whether 
the Son of man, if he should suddenly come 
into our churches, would find among us the 
faith that overcometh the world. 

We point to our costly and beautiful temples 
of worship, to the crosses crowning the village 
hill-tops, and the crosses the church spires lift 
above the city's smoke and strife. We count 
our great missionary benefactions, and hold 
mammoth religious conventions. We are per- 
fecting and unifying our great ecclesiastical 
organizations, and forming new societies, and 
appointing countless committees. We have re- 
vised creeds, and progressive theologies, and 
renowned preachers. But all the while the 
church is getting farther and farther away from 
the lost sheep it was sent to save. The covet- 
ousness that fattens on the flesh of toiling boys 
and girls ; the greed that wrecks the hopes and 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 25 

fortunes of less cunning rivals ; the fashion 
whose fatuous arrogance fans the flame of judg- 
ment that is kindling in the skies ; the luxury 
that is content to enjoy, while men with dark 
thoughts beg for work, and hopeless women 
slave in sweaters' dens, and the life withers out 
of starved babes ; — all these smile and bow 
and pray in the church, while the great sad, sus- 
picious world impatiently waits to see whether 
God be living or dead. This is not Christianity. 
This is not according to the gospel of Jesus 
Christ. Much of what we call Christianity is 
no less than an aristocratic and shameless pau- 
perism, thriving on the wealth of sacrifice in- 
herited from the past ; resting in high-priced 
pews and fashionable residences ; cunningly 
squeezing a luxurious living out of humanity, and 
superciliously labelling as charity the appeals 
made to serve the humanity that supports it. It 
is the victorious forces of time the church wor- 
ships — prudence, thrift, respectability, reputa- 
tion, culture — while it is practically infidel 
to the Christian gospel. We hear wise men, 
indeed, " preaching up truth and preaching 



26 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

down error " from the pulpit ; but it is nearly 
always theological error, while a refined brutal- 
ity practises, under the church's protection, a 
conscienceless and defiant atheism. Religious 
papers deplore the influence of money in poli- 
tics ; but seem innocent of the fact that money 
has no less influence, if not more, in securing 
certains kinds of ecclesiastical prominence, in 
obtaining positions of trust in religious corpora- 
tions, than in securing seats in our national 
legislature. Our social system, even where it is 
churchly, is not Christian, but respectable pagan- 
ism, galvanized with Christianity. The church 
does not dream of practising the gospel ; rather, 
it has practically abandoned the gospel as the 
law of life, putting opinion and money in its 
place, rearing the throne of mammon in the 
place of the changeless cross of the slain Christ, 
taking to itself the attitude of the scribes and 
Pharisees, instead of following the Son of God 
with the divine sorrow which alone can cleanse 
the race of sin. Unconsecrated men, who lie 
and rob and destroy, who outrage all humanities 
and gorge themselves with blood-red gold, may 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 2 J 

yet pass for men of integrity and conspicuous 
Christian philanthropy, whose self-satisfaction 
it seems cruel and unjust to disturb with the 
social impoliteness of the Sermon on the Mount. 
The church as an institution is saying, " Lord, 
Lord ; " but its leaders are not doing, nor have 
they any faith in the practicability of doing, the 
things the Lord tells them. And I sadly fear 
it to be true, — would God that I might be 
wrong ! — that the most unmoving obstacle 
which the coming Christ confronts in the re- 
demption of human society, is the raw unbelief 
in righteousness, the nice and delicate yet no 
less blind and hateful infidelity to the gospel, 
which permeates our conservative Christianity, 
making the church the antagonist of the right- 
eousness of Christ. For that church which 
worships Christ, and yet rejects his way of liv- 
ing, is the Judas Iscariot of moden Christendom. 
The church must have a new career. There 
must be a resurrection of the gospel. An 
emancipated gospel is the hope of human soci- 
ety. For this the world prays and waits. To 
deliver the gospel from the weight of heathen 



28 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

theology, which has well-nigh smothered its 
life ; to wrest Christianity from the distorting 
grasp of human selfishness ; to preach the gos- 
pel in its divine simplicity and regal authority ; 
to Christianize the church which bears Christ's 
name, — this is the work which calls all the 
sons of God who are ready to make themselves 
of no reputation in the eyes of the Pharisees, 
and be despised and rejected by the self-indul- 
gent worshippers of mammon. That faith which 
tries to be a substitute for life is the self-willed 
infidelity, the incurable unbelief, which an apos- 
tolic faith must scourge from the church, before 
the Son of man can lead it forth in the victory 
of righteousness which shall bring in the thou- 
sand years of peace. The church which, under 
the cover of dogma, disbelieves in the power 
of Christ to lead us out of actual selfishness ; 
which believes that men can be saved from sin 
by holding certain opinions about God, without 
ceasing from sin ; which impugns the honesty 
of God by assuming that he never intended us to 
do as his Eternal Son tells us ; which presumes 
that God would promulgate a divine gospel 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 29 

which is unnatural law, and which man cannot 
practise ; which puts forth Christ's righteous- 
ness as something to take the place of our own, 
so that we can go on enjoying the world's com- 
forts, and gaining its profits according to its 
covetous customs; — not by such a church will 
God convert the race. God will never permit 
a church which does not itself believe the gos- 
pel, or pretend to obey it, to carry the gospel to 
every creature. Nor will the divine intelli- 
gence of humanity receive a theology that 
teaches a salvation from sin without ceasing 
from sin ; for, however needful and progressive 
such a theology may once have been, it has 
done its work ; and, in the increasing light of 
the grace that shines from the face of the heal- 
ing Christ, is naught but an unholy supersti- 
tion. No revision of creeds, no holding of con- 
ventions, no flaunting of banners, no missionary 
enthusiasm, can evade the supreme and epochal 
issue which now confronts the church, in this 
the beginning of the most revolutionary period 
of Christian history. The question the church 
must answer, the question which converges all 



30 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

gone and coming historic crises, carrying in 
itself the solution of all human problems, is 
this : Is the gospel practicable? does God mean 
it ? is redemption a reality ? has Christ over- 
come the world ? is the Christ who is in us 
greater than the devil of selfishness without 
us ? Until the church — I trust not at the 
point of death — enters upon a searching self- 
examination, and decides whether it really be- 
lieves in this gospel, whether it accepts or 
rejects it, the conversion of the world to Chris- 
tianity is the very vanity of our moral imbecil- 
ity. If the church tries to evade this supreme 
moment of its history, persisting in preaching 
the gospel of theology instead of the living 
Christ ; if it revels in the glory of the past, and 
rejoices in its heritage in the present, without 
presenting itself as a living and unblemished 
sacrifice unto God ; if it continues to hide from 
the world, in the interests of social selfishness 
and dogmatic theology, what Christianity really 
is ; if it persists in a wordy loyalty to its creeds, 
and infidelity to the Sermon on the Mount ; 
then God will meet it upon the way upon which 



UNCONSECRATED SERVICE. 31 

he sent it, in its palaces of vain worship, and 
leave not one stone of its goodly temples upon 
another. 

I have said all this, my brothers, because I 
am an optimist ; because I believe in the divine 
life in man ; because I see that the kingdom of 
heaven is at hand. If I were a pessimist I 
should glorify what is, rather than herald the 
better that is to be. The world is redeemed. Our 
Redeemer lives, and his Spirit reigns, and there 
is no more excuse for our abiding in unright- 
eousness. This is God's world, and the laws of 
God are more practicable than the laws of the 
devil. This was the faith of the apostles. It 
is the faith which the Spirit of God has wrung 
from the agony of apostolic souls since the rapt 
John saw the Christ of judgment moving in the 
progress of the ages towards their divine con- 
sumation in the new earth of righteousness, rest- 
ing in the eternal Sabbath of God, communistic 
with the ensphering love of the new heaven. 

To the work of restoring Christianity to 
Christendom, of giving back the gospel unto 
men, the coming Christ now calls us. To the 



32 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

measure that we put reputation and happiness, 
position and possessions, affections and all 
sacred interests, upon the altar of a perfect 
sacrifice, taking willingly for our portion what- 
ever lot he assigns us, believing in the right- 
eousness of our cause and the rectitude of our 
course, loving not our lives unto death, to that 
measure will the joy that was set before him 
be our joy, and his glory our throne. And he 
will keep us in the hour of trial that is to come 
quickly upon the whole world, and write upon 
us his own name, and the name of the New 
Jerusalem which cometh down out of heaven 
from God. 

" Great truths are portions of the soul of man; 

Great souls are portions of eternity ; 
Each drop of blood which e'er through true heart ran 

With lofty message, ran for me and thee ; 
For God's law, since the starry song began, 

Hath been, and still forever more must be, 
That every deed which shall outlast Time's span, 

Must spur the soul to be erect and free ; 
Slave is no word of deathless lineage sprung ; 

Too many noble souls have thought and died, 
Too many mighty poets lived and sung, 

And our good Saxon, from lips purified 
With martyr-fire, throughout the world hath rung 

Too long to have God's holy cause denied." 



II. 

THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 



The disastrous results of a diffusion of Christianity at the 
cost of its intensity is very apparent to those of us who are 
greatly interested in the social problems of the present moment. 
... It is quite beyond all question that, according to the inten- 
tion of Christ, the Christian church should at all times represent 
a body living not only by a certain rule of faith, but also by a 
certain moral law, which puts the sternest restraints on the 
spirit of competition, on the acquisition of wealth, on selfish 
aggrandizement ; which bids every man, in the simplest sense, 
love his neighbor as himself; which enjoins the bearing of one 
another's burdens, as the only fulfilling of the law of Christ. 
It is difficult to imagine that a New-Testament Christian could 
have doubted that he had to carry his religion into all the 
affairs of life, or could have been in the least surprised if his 
religion involved his being poorer than one of his non-Christian 
neighbors who was not bound by the obligations of the church. 
How is it then that we have reached a condition of things 
when men cannot only utter, as multitudes of men always have 
done, the maxims of worldliness and selfishness, but utter these 
maxims without any sense that, by simply giving expression to 
them, they are repudiating Christianity, as far as words go, 
quite as really as if they were denying the Christian creed, or 
as if in the old days of persecution they had offered incense 
to the divinity of the Roman emperor ? . . . — Principal 
Charles Gore. 

Have we learnt it yet — this eternal message of love, this 
good tidings of spiritual freedom, this character of heavenly 
privileges, this birthright of spiritual blessing? Nay, rather 
have not we and our fathers so obscured it by the blinding 
veil of our dogmatisms, ritualisms, and sabbatisms, that a weary 
world is crying out to us to-day, " Restore to us the Christian- 
ity of Christ " ? May God give strength and volume to the 
voice of that righteous, that agonized demand, until we, the 
teachers, pressed onward by the spirit within and the urgency 
without, shall trample underfoot the galling tradition of the 
elders and speak at length with the accents of Christ's simple 
love. . . . — Bishop Moor house. 
34 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 

Behold, I have set before thee a door opened, which none 
can shut. — Rev. iii. 8. 

The more I read the Revelation of John, the 
more I receive it as the message of a great soul 
whose vision of God had been clarified by deep 
sufferings. The book was written while John 
was an exile on the isle of Patmos, during one 
of the early and bloody persecutions by which 
Rome sought, as a matter of political safety 
rather than of religious concern, to extinguish 
the Christian faith. However despicable the 
religion of Christ to their pride, the Romans 
clearly saw that the practice of its principles, 
if wide-spread, could not but eventually destroy 
the foundations of force and fraud on which 
imperialism rested. The whole Revelation 
reflects the lights and shadows of the sad and 
mighty days through which the church was 
passing, persecuted by merciless enemies with- 
35 



36 A FLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

out, imperilled by betrayers of the truth within. 
A world of heroic experiences is mirrored in 
the apostle's designation of himself and some 
of his fellow-Christians as brothers and par- 
takers in the tribulations and patience of Jesus. 
He seems to have spent the time of his exile in 
the closest communion with God, straining the 
eyes of his faith to see what might be the inten- 
tions of God concerning his people. It may be 
that the nature of John's banishment was such 
that he had no refuge from pain of body and 
grief of mind save in making prayer his occupa- 
tion. It was while communing in the heart of 
the Father, caught up in the eternally onward 
sweep of the Divine Spirit, that John found 
himself in company with the light-ensphered 
Christ of judgment, going forth in the unrest- 
ing power of an all-loving righteousness to 
conquer all things visible and invisible by his 
resistless strength. With a voice like that of 
many waters, the Son of man bade him write 
all he saw and heard, giving him a distinct mes- 
sage for each of the seven churches which had 
been within the sphere of his authority. And 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 37 

with the reception of these messages the vision 
of John widened to take in the historical pro- 
cesses by which the kingdoms of the world were 
finally to be converted into the kingdom of 
Christ. 

The message of Jesus to the church at Phila- 
delphia was one of loving commendation and 
appreciative sympathy. The Philadelphian 
Christians were warned of the hour of trial 
which was about to shake and change the 
whole inhabited earth, and test the courage 
and quality of Christian believers. The new 
Jerusalem, by which was meant a divinely just 
and righteous civilization, was descending out 
of heaven from God ; and the ransomed ages 
would read in the records of God that these 
obscure, despised, and persecuted Christians 
were the builders of the indestructible founda- 
tions of righteousness and truth upon which 
Christ was rearing, through the crisis of his- 
tory, the heavenly social structure which is the 
theme and prophecy of the supremely mystical 
yet intensely practical Revelation. Thus 
Christ set before the faithful Philadelphians, 



38 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

who were trusting in the divine strength to fill 
up the measure of their weakness, an open 
door of the largest usefulness, through which 
they might enter the life and work of God. 
And none could shut it ; no earthly power nor 
false friends ; neither persecutions nor death. 

The door of life swings always open, inviting 
every soul to larger usefulness, to a closer 
union with the thought and work of God. The 
immanent Christ is forever calling us to be 
better workmen of the tabernacle of love in 
which God is to dwell with men and make 
them his people. The divine voice that bids 
us come up higher is never silent. No human 
weakness can close Christ's door. No earthly 
power can move the hand that openeth and 
shutteth. No adverse circumstances can di- 
minish the fruitfulness of human consecration. 
Nothing can happen to a soul, a church, or a 
nation, that Christ would not make an open 
door of consecration to greater living and 
diviner usefulness. The door of opportunity 
is always open. Unbelief may refuse to enter. 
But none can shut the door which Christ opens. 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 39 

If man believed in the divine authority of 
Christ as Christ believed in the divine life in 
man, the redemption of the world would soon 
be manifested as a fact which none could deny, 
or would wish to deny. And the new earth of 
righteousness and peace would push out the old 
earth of injustice and strife with the speed of 
God's desire. Christ was the supreme idealist. 
He saw in all men the offspring of God. His 
gospel proceeds upon the assumption of the 
divinity of our humanity. We are made of the 
stuff that constitutes God. Hence our Lord 
knew no limit to the possibilities of human 
character, because he knew no limit to the 
gracious power of God which was working in 
man and causing man to work out his salvation 
in divine being and doing. The call of Christ 
is the awakening of the soul to its divine ances- 
try, which sin has obscured and dishonored. It 
is the quickening of the divine energies which 
sleep beneath man's moral sloth and corruption. 
It is a resurrection from a self-entombment 
into the glory of a divine childhood. It is a 
call to quit ourselves as men that God through 



40 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

us may manifest himself as God. Christ called 
men to reveal and realize God in the world 
through a divinely human sonship. He sent 
men to show forth, as he had done, the human- 
ity of God in the divinity of their manhood. 
He uplifted men with a vision of the divine 
ideal of human life which was within the reach 
and realization of their faith. He saw men en- 
larging according to the greatness of their think- 
ing. He measured character by aspiration. He 
appealed to man's undeveloped spiritual hero- 
ism ; not to what was slavish, or fearful, or 
selfish, or ease-loving. The cross was in every 
path of spiritual growth and achievement which 
Christ pointed out. Every door of opportunity 
which he opened was a door of sacrifice. 

Before the church of our day the Christ of 
judgment, the ruler of the kings of earth, with a 
countenance as the sun shining in his strength, 
opens wide the effectual door of the church's 
supreme opportunity. With a voice like the 
voice of many waters, gathering into itself the 
questions of the centuries, he is calling for a 
regenerated Christianity to enter and claim the 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 4 1 

earth and its fulness as God's. The Christian- 
izing of industry, the gospelizing of commerce, 
the moral enforcement of the Sermon on the 
Mount, the proclamation of the cross as the 
basic principle of society, is the work that is 
now before the church. The opportunity of 
the church is the brotherhood of man. Buying 
and selling, work and wages, must be converted 
into divine sacraments of human fellozvship. 
The fate of Christianity itself is at stake in 
meeting the problems of society and finance. 
If the church does not take up these responsi- 
bilities, and set itself about righting the wrongs 
that are making the few rich and the many 
poor, putting strife between classes, making 
enemies of men who should be brothers, the 
church will fail in the greatest opportunity the 
Lord Christ has put in its hands ; and he will 
make a new church. Until the church takes 
hold of these problems in the spirit and power 
of the gospel — and that only is sufficient to 
solve these questions — insisting that men can 
and must obey the gospel, then in multiplying 
our churches we are making ropes of sand ; 



42 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

doing work that shall have to be done over 
again in purer and braver days. It is essential 
atheism, it is to worship a powerless God and 
believe in a dead Christ, to presume that our 
industrial system, with its poverty and wealth, 
its war and want, its inequality of distribution, 
can endure. The pulpit must teach that it is 
the business of the employer to so conduct his 
affairs that the fatherhood of God and brother- 
hood of man shall be facts in his establishment. 
If Christianity has any authority, and I believe 
it has all authority, it must produce men who 
will as truly trade and work for righteousness' 
sake as the pulpit is supposed to preach for 
righteousness' sake. And why does it seem to 
Christian men unreasonable that a human being 
should toil, invent, and do business, for the good 
of others than himself ? Why cannot a man 
work as faithfully and wisely for benefits which 
his fellow-men are to enjoy as for his own self- 
ish profit and enjoyment ? Why does it seem 
strange to the twentieth century of Christian 
history that a man should be stimulated to far 
higher endeavors, to more untiring efforts, to 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 43 

build up industry for the benefit of society 
rather than his own selfish benefit ? Why in 
the name of reason and righteousness, in the 
name of the suffering Christ, cannot a man be 
as fertile and energetic in doing business for 
righteousness' sake as in doing business for 
his own sake ? 

The answer to these questions, the remedy 
for social inequality, cannot be found in what 
we understand by modern benevolence. The 
gifts of money to endow colleges and replenish 
missionary funds from the hands of extortionate 
wealth are a simple evasion of the whole social 
problem, and a trifling with God. Instead of 
making the future hopeful, such philanthropy is 
the most hopeless feature in the social propsect. 
Gifts to universities and libraries and hospitals 
on the part of covetousness and bribery and 
greed are disgusting to the soul of God. The 
flattering of such givers as these by the church 
not only abominably falsifies the gospel of 
Christ, but makes the lost sheep of the house 
of Israel the suspicious enemies of the church 
Christ sent to be their friend. Never ought the 



44 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

church to feel such utter shame as when behold- 
ing its leaders scheming to get gifts of money 
made possible only by entire infidelity to the 
gospel of righteousness. The jubilees which 
the church holds in honor of the so-called bene- 
factions of stock-gamblers and railroad-wreckers, 
of trust monopolists and oppressors of the poor, 
are but a ridiculous and ill-disguised religious 
hookwinkery. Christ did not send his church 
into the world to get the money of mammon, 
but to defend the oppressed, denounce wicked- 
ness, establish justice, and work righteousness. 
Christ did not receive Zaccheus, the rich pub- 
lican, because he made an offering of money, 
but because he repented of his sins and re- 
stored fourfold his wrongly exacted gains. The 
church not only betrays Christ, who was the 
most terrible of all prophets in his condemna- 
tion of extortion and covetousness, but, in the 
long run, materially as well as morally loses by 
its shameful cowardice. If there is any truth 
in the gospel worth living for, or worth dying 
for, it is the truth that men are their brothers' 
keepers. If the gospel is true and authoritative, 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 45 

it is the most imperative duty of the church to 
lift up an unceasing complaint against our 
social and financial evils, against progress by 
the ruin and impoverishment of society, against 
the under-payment of wages, against the present 
interpretation of the law of supply and demand, 
until these shall be relegated to the museum of 
history, to take their place with the tomahawk 
and scalping-knife, the pirate ship and inquisi- 
tion rack. 

Christianity came into the world as a fellow- 
ship, a brotherhood. Christ came not as a 
theologian ; nor were the apostles theologians. 
Christ's doctrines were not theological, but so- 
cial. Christ was the revelation of a life — the 
life of God in fellowship with the life of man ; the 
life of man in fellowship with the life of God. 
That God is our Father, and all men brothers 
and his children, was the substance of Christ's 
teaching. The realization of this apostolic 
Christianity carries in itself the future of 
human history, and is the solution of all the 
problems of society. 

Many run to and fro with panaceas, which 



46 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

they think will adjust the inequalities of soci- 
ety and hush the cries of discontent. While 
many of the proposals are wise and needful, 
springing from pure desires to help the world 
to a better condition, yet no political legislation 
has power, or ever can have power, to make 
men unselfish. Until men dedicate themselves 
to lives of unselfishness, and live to do good to 
all their brothers, and are ready to be as fertile 
and persevering in labors which are to benefit 
society as a whole rather than themselves as 
individuals, injustice and inequality will be ban- 
ished in one form only to return in some form 
more seductive and cruel. Until the eternal 
law of love is written on human hearts, and 
giving rather than getting inspires the energies 
of men, and serving rather than being served 
is received as the joy of life, the best of state 
legislation is helpless to effect social justice and 
industrial peace. So long as men are foolish 
enough to have more faith in the efficacy of law 
than in the practicability of love, the blood of 
Abel will continue to cry from the ground. 
The brand of Cain will rest upon society so long 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 47 

as self-interest is assumed as the social and eco- 
nomic motive. Until the peace of God has 
fixed the faith of the world on Jesus Christ as 
the goal of history, and the solvent of all human 
ills, clasping the hands of men about the cross 
of Christ — the sign of self-renunciation — as 
the only law which can establish permanent 
order and perfect peace, mutual trust and ever- 
lasting brotherhood, there will be dissatisfac- 
tion and sorrow, injustice and cruelty, despoiling 
the garden of the Lord. Were it not that Jesus 
had walked the soil of the earth, re-dedicating it 
to God, living his divine life amidst the most 
unfavorable surroundings, I should dwell in 
absolute hopelessness. But because that life 
was lived and that death was died, revealing 
God's attitude towards man, and showing what 
the life of man may be when it values character 
above all material things, and believes in love 
more than food and raiment, I hope all things 
and believe all things for man. I look for a 
brotherhood of divine love upon the earth, be- 
cause Christ is our elder brother, and we shall 
be like him. 



48 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

And it is brotherhood, fellowship, which man 
wants. Brotherhood men will have. The soli- 
darity of the race is impressing itself on the 
world as a most stupendous human fact. Men 
are feeling about for oneness with each other, 
as well as for oneness with God. There is a 
divine impulse, gathering in force with the in- 
crease of human sympathy and understanding, 
which is bearing men on to a larger fellowship 
with one another. There is a feeling abroad in 
the world that rivalry and distrust, competition 
and covetousness, are not the natural, but the 
unnatural, conditions of human society. Men 
were made to stand together. Social separa- 
tion is disruption, profanity, damnation, and 
death. Without brotherhood men cannot en- 
dure life, nor its conflicts. Anything that 
keeps men apart is the work of an enemy to 
our humanity. The stratification of society is 
a device of the devil, the slanderer of God, and 
tempter of man. Social separation, the isola- 
tion of the privileged from the unprivileged 
classes, the withdrawal of life from fellowship 
with life for material and selfish reasons, is 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 49 

moral anarchy and outrage ; it is the most god- 
less and wicked of all infidelity, asserting that 
human life consists in the abundance of the 
things which it hath, that the immortal life 
which God has breathed into man is cheaper 
than the fashion of his clothes, or worthy of 
less consideration than the etiquette of his 
manners. Selfishness as the law of society is 
hell on earth. The social theory that we are 
privileged to choose our neighbors is a rending 
of the body of God by the violence of selfish- 
ness ; a profanation of God's holy temple, which 
man is ; a condition which will not always be 
endured. There is no more deadly assumption 
ever made than the one that money gives any 
man the right to be unmindful of the interests 
and needs and feelings of his brother-men. It 
is the separation of the educated from the igno- 
rant, the rich from the poor, that makes money 
a root of social evil. All social caste, however 
ancient and proud, is pagan and evil, hateful 
and profane. The place of the strong is among 
the weak, bearing their burdens, enduring the 
pain and shame of their weakness. The place 



50 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

of the cultured is among the rude and ignorant, 
lifting them up, teaching them knowledge and 
goodness and truth. The place of the rich is 
in living side by side with the poor, not in iso- 
lating themselves on separate streets, and not 
in holding themselves aloof from the company 
of the poor. The place of those who have is 
with those who have not, treating them with 
respect and honor and love that is due unto the 
children of God. When thou makest a dinner, 
or a party, call not merely thy rich and con- 
genial friends, who can reward thee with pleas- 
ure and return invitations, but invite the poor 
and ignorant, and even the vicious. This is 
the gospel of the Son of God, who dwelt among 
us in our moral rags and poverty, and gave unto 
us all the glory and wealth of his infinite life. 
The mere fact that society would regard Christ's 
social instructions as preposterous, if expected 
to actually obey them, shows how little our so- 
called Christian society really knows of Christi- 
anity, and how much is yet to be done before 
we have a society that shall be Christian in 
reality. 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 5 1 

Brotherhood men will have. The movement 
of the world is in this direction. And it will 
be a fellowship of truth or a fellowship of sin ; 
a fellowship of love or a fellowship of hate 
and rapine ; a fellowship of atheism or of the 
church of Christ. In some form or other men 
will come together, and life will intwine about 
life, soul will wrap itself about soul, heart will 
fasten itself to heart, and men will stand to- 
gether in some great social upheaval and recon- 
struction. And I believe that in the lead of 
the social conflict will be found the Son of man, 
bringing forth a divine social order and estab- 
lishing a brotherhood of love, showing men that 
the strength of life is in sacrifice, the joy of life 
in loving, the enthusiasm of life in serving. 

The open door of opportunity which Christ 
sets before us each to enter is this coming 
brotherhood of man. To make the love of 
Christ the foundation of commerce and culture, 
to make the practice and spread of Christ's 
quality of love the business of life, is the work 
to which we are called. Before every human 
enterprise, before every joy and sorrow, at the 



52 THE PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

first hour and the eleventh, the Son of man 
sets this clear, strong, eternal motive — a mo- 
tive that will give a changeless meaning to 
all human endeavor, making the years a prog- 
ress to a divine end, linking deed with deed, 
connecting thought with thought. That men 
may learn to love and trust one another as the 
common and redeemed children of the same 
Father is the reason for the earth's standing 
through all its storm of sin and shame. It is 
the purpose with which God began the life of 
man, and the hope which has sustained man 
through all the weary ages of his pilgrimage. 
It is the vision which Christ followed through 
the wilderness, into Gethsemane, across Cal- 
vary, through the clouds. It is the one thing 
certain in which a man may invest his life and 
be sure of an eternal return. It is the enter- 
prise in which the living and working Christ 
would have us be his fellow-workmen. Our 
stores and factories, our knowledge and culture, 
our schools and feasts, are opportunities to 
obey and enforce the commandment to love one 
another in the life-giving and self-renounced 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH. 53 

way in which Jesus loved his disciples. The 
joy of dying that others might live, the glory 
of living without self-concern, the enthusiasm 
of feeding his life away to his hungry brothers, 
— this was the joy that was set before Christ, 
and is the quenchless joy before us set. To 
get men to love one another, and thus get the 
will of God done on earth as it is in heaven, is 
our mission as truly as it was the mission of 
Jesus. We can each take this mission as our 
life-motive — the motive which abides in the 
heart of God — and keep this motive as the 
seed of life through all joy and sorrow, success 
and disappointment, failure and victory. Upon 
the altar of this infinite purpose we may each 
dedicate ourselves as living sacrifices, holy and 
acceptable unto God. 

Does this seem a dream ? Well, until men 
believe in the authority of this dream, and 
proceed to make it the substantial basis of 
society, the earth will find no rest from woe 
and war and want. There is salvation from 
unrest and strife, inequality and injustice, only 
in simple obedience to Christ's law of love. 



54 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

However much we may do to procure larger 
justice through purer laws, until we clasp hands 
about the cross and agree to take that cross as 
the law of life, we spend our strength for that 
which is not eternal bread, and waste our moral 
resources in playing with the urgent opportuni- 
ties of Christendom. 

The discord and sorrow of sin is the witness 
that sin is not man's natural condition. Moral 
weakness is not man's normal state. Evil is an 
intruder, and has no right in the life of man, 
nor in God's world. Selfishness is an unnatural 
outrage upon our humanity. The laws of the 
devil are not more practicable than the laws of 
God, neither in the closet nor in the market. 
Communion with God is man's only natural 
condition ; it is the only use to which time and 
property can be rightly put. Man is an aimless 
and wandering prodigal outside of the secret 
place of the Most High. Humanity at its 
worst, through all its inexplicable sorrows, along 
the darkest labyrinths of its sad pilgrimage, has 
never lost sight of this goal of an endless, sin- 
less, deathless day of peace, in which the pres- 



THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 55 

ence of God would be the life and light of the 
world. The race has never been without some 
eyes pure enough to see a new earth. All 
prophecy and revelation, the purest statesman- 
ship and best political wisdom, the noblest 
philosophy and most undefiled religion, have 
all had this vision of a new earth wherein dwell- 
eth righteousness as their inspiration. 

The day of God will come, and the heart of 
the earth will ache no more, and the riven side 
of the race will cease to flow, and the spirit of 
Jesus will be the omnipotent bond of human 
brotherhood, and children will be born into an 
atmosphere of prayer, and sin and death be a 
dream of a night, and the pain of the groaning 
creation be changed to an anthem of praise, when 
the disciples of Christ come to so believe in 
the reality of his redemption that they dedicate 
all they are and have to the righteousness of 
his kingdom. The creation groans and travails 
in pain, waiting only for the children of men 
to stand forth and show themselves the sons 
of God. 

The day of God will come ; and there will be 



56 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

night no more. Humanity moves upward ; and 
the heavens lower bend, age by age, folding 
the earth closer in the heart of the Father. 
And heaven and earth, under the hand of the 
risen Christ, who holds the key to human his- 
tory, will be attuned in one eternal harmony of 
love. This is the pledge of the cross, and the 
power of the resurrection. It is the coming 
kingdom of our Father which he will receive 
from the hand of his conquering Christ. And 
whether we be absent or present, we may work 
with our Lord in this kingdom which cannot 
be shaken. Wherefore, let us be steadfast, 
unmovable, always abounding in the work of 
the Lord, inasmuch as we know that our labor 
is not in vain. 



III. 

THE REALITY OF FAITH. 



In England, as elsewhere, the ecclesiastical body still 
seemed imposing from the memories of its past, its immense 
wealth, its tradition of statesmanship, its long association 
with the intellectual and religious aspirations of men, its hold 
on social life. But its real power was small. Its moral in- 
ertness, its lack of spiritual enthusiasm, gave it less and less 
hold on the religious minds of the day. Its energies, indeed, 
seemed absorbed in a mere clinging to existence. ... Its 
most fatal effect was to rob the priesthood of moral power. 
Taunted with a love of wealth, with a lower standard of life 
than that of the ploughman and weaver who gathered to read 
the Bible by night, dreading in themselves any burst of 
emotion or enthusiasm as a possible prelude to heresy, the 
clergy ceased to be the moral leaders of the nation. — fohn 
Richard Green, on the religious condition of England in the 
fifteenth century. 

It may be that too much time has been spent upon specu- 
lations about Christianity, whether true or false, and that that 
which is essential consists not of speculations, but of facts, 
and not in technical accuracy on questions of metaphysics, 
but in the attitude of mind in which we regard them. It would 
be a cold world in which no sun shone until the inhabitants 
thereof had arrived at a true chemical analysis of sunlight. 
And it may be that the knowledge and thought of our time, 
which is drawing us away from the speculative elements in 
religion to that conception of it which builds it upon the char- 
acter and not upon the intellect, is drawing us thereby to that 
conception of it which the life of Christ was intended to set 
forth, and which will yet regenerate the world. — Dr. Edwin 
Hatch. 

Never was there a time, in the history of the world, when 
moral heroes were more needed. The world waits for such. 
The providence of God has commanded science to labor and 
prepare the way for such. For them she is laying her iron 
tracks and stretching her wires, and bridging the oceans. 
But where are they ? Who shall breathe into our civil and 
political relations the breath of a higher life ? — Dr. Mark 
Hopkins. 

58 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. 

And Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him 
for righteousness. — Rom. iv. 3. 

The students of antiquities, reading for us 
the records of the past on broken bricks and 
crumbling monuments, say that the times we 
used to call the dawn of history were, in fact, 
the noontide of a splendid material develop- 
ment and a vast civilization. Historic science 
finds no time when the peopled earth has 
not supported organized institutions, and been 
crowned by majestic temples. Back of Abra- 
ham's time history recedes in the fall and rise 
of empires ; in the decay and growth of reli- 
gions ; in the westward movements of races. 
In the day that God called Abraham the early 
Chaldean nations had already taken on some 
of the magnificence which, centuries hence, 
was to make the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar 
the very exaggeration of Oriental genius and 
59 



60 A FLEA FOR FHE GOSPEL. 

power. Ur, from whence Abraham went forth 
obedient to the divine command to found a 
new nation, was a strong-walled city of astrono- 
mers and poets, politics and trades, soldiers 
and libraries, theatres and temples. 

But this ancient civilization was a beautiful 
and gigantic body without a soul. It knew 
much of force, but little of law ; something of 
beauty, but nearly nothing of morals. It cele- 
brated the vilest sins as religious rites. It was 
built upon faith in the seen, in ignorance of the 
unseen realities. And the Chaldeans, making 
the mistake which has been fatal to the perma- 
nence of all civilizations, believed in their lux- 
ury and material prosperity as progress. They 
were immensely satisfied with themselves, and 
proud of their achievements. Some of their 
expressions of self-approbation, which the schol- 
ars have translated for us, are striking in their 
likeness to the typical American Fourth of July 
oration, though made from three to four thou- 
sand years ago. Blind and fallen human nature, 
tempted from God by the serpent of covetous- 
ness, has always spent its strength and skill on 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. 6l 

the husks and clothes of life, while the sub- 
stance dissolved in glorious corruption. Civili- 
zations have always been shorn of their strength 
in the lap of luxury, their decay shrouded in 
material grandeur. Wealth is progress only 
when it is a communion with God and a bond 
of brotherhood between men. The spirit of 
wealth has never dominated a civilization and 
dictated its laws, save to its ultimate destruction. 
Amidst the might and luxury of the primitive 
Chaldean world lived a man who had kept him- 
self free from its sensuous idolatry, and pure 
enough to see one of God's beckoning stars of 
promise ; so he decided to cast in his lot with 
God. Abraham could not have been unac- 
quainted with the material grandeur of this 
Oriental civilization ; but he was not corrupted 
by its grossness, nor dazzled by its splendor. 
He began to have fitful dreams of a new and 
better order of things upon the earth. He 
could not believe that God was any the better 
satisfied with falsehood and cruelty, lust and 
luxury, because they were housed in huge pal- 
aces and clothed in silk and gold. As he 



62 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

brooded over the magnificent wretchedness of 
his times, and watched God's star of promise 
shining from the future, there was borne in 
upon him a strong impulse to move out into 
the world in the hope of establishing a nation 
that would be the seed of a new earth. That 
impulse bade him get away from the corrupt 
civilization wherein he dwelt into a westward 
land which he had never seen, and there raise 
up unto his God a new people. He accepted 
that impulse as the voice of God. He gave 
into his divine instincts implicit obedience. He 
believed God, and it was reckoned unto him 
for righteousness. And through all the lonely 
and eventful years that followed, as he pilgrim- 
aged to and fro across the promised land, he 
followed the voice that spake in the secret 
places of his soul. When God promised him a 
son in his old age, he believed God in this as in 
everything else, and it was reckoned unto him 
for righteousness. And when we consider 
Abraham's times, their social and religious con- 
dition, it is no wonder he comes down to us as 
the most illustrious ancient hero of faith. 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. 63 

What, now, is the faith that moves prophetic 
souls out of the beaten walks of life, and up 
the higher walks, where a reluctant race slowly 
follows them ? What is the nature of the faith 
which makes for righteousness ? What is the 
essence, the reality, of faith ? What is it, in 
our times, that makes one man's belief in God 
a religious pleasantry and social propriety, and 
another man's faith a creative force in society? 

Faith does not consist in holding correct 
opinions of God. Dr. Martineau truly says 
that "nothing so marks the degradation of 
modern Christianity as the notion that faith is 
only opinion." A man may hold the most 
proper opinions of God, he may believe in every 
letter of the most orthodox confession of faith, 
and be a graceful infidel in all his thought, an 
atheist in all his practices. Probably all that 
Abraham knew of God was that he stood for 
righteousness against unrighteousness ; but to 
that knowledge Abraham surrendered himself, 
with all that he possessed. God cares nothing 
for a man's opinions of himself, or his attri- 
butes, when the man's moral aspirations reach 



64 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

not beyond a respectable social and financial 
standing on earth, and a comfortable mansion 
in heaven. Opinion is not faith. 

Nor is faith a substitute for righteousness. 
The conception of faith as something God ac- 
cepts in the place of holiness is a Protestant 
superstition as unscriptural and immoral as any 
superstition of middle-age Catholicism. The 
assumption that men can lead selfish and covet- 
ous lives, and then reach heaven by believing 
the right things about God, needs to be elimi- 
nated from the religious thought of the church 
of our day as surely as the sale of indulgences 
from the church of Luther's day. The church 
will never take up its divinely appointed task 
of righting the wrong things of this world until 
it comes to thoroughly understand that Christ 
came not to save men in their sins, but to give 
them power to cease from all ungodliness. 
There is no salvation from sin other than the 
abandonment of sin, neither in this world nor 
the world to come. Opinions of God are no 
magic to change character at death. He that 
is unrighteous before death will be unrighteous 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. 65 

still ; he that is unjust will still be unjust ; the 
selfish man will still be selfish. A man is not 
justified by faith unless faith has made him just. 
He may have the greatest respect for God, 
be extremely polite in his treatment of God, 
attentive to all divine ordinances, thinking he 
doeth God service as a protector of faith, and 
yet be destitute of all knowledge of the reality 
of faith, barren of any moral conception of 
what it means to believe God. 

Faith is that response of the will of man 
which unites it to the will of God. Faith is 
that step, whether one or many, which conjoins 
the life of a man with the life of God. Faith 
is that action which surrenders all one's inter- 
ests to the getting of God's will done upon the 
earth as it is done in heaven. Faith is unre- 
served co-operation, partnership, friendship with 
God, so that God possesses the life, working 
with it and through it ; so that the man of faith 
is not his own man, but God's man. The man 
of faith is not blinded by the self-satisfaction of 
society ; not deceived by material progress ; 
neither bewildered by the babble of admiring 



66 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

voices, nor borne down beneath defeat. It is 
the very essence of faith to listen only to the 
voice of God, and learn what God wants done 
and is doing in the believer's day and genera- 
tion, inquiring not for immediate results, con- 
scious that only righteousness is progressive 
and profitable in the everlasting summing-up of 
things. He who believes God asks himself if 
God be satisfied with the state of things in his 
age ; in his country or city ; in his church or 
his own heart. Listening eagerly to the voice 
that speaks in the secret place of his con- 
science, he peers into the future for stars of 
promise, and obeys the inspirations of hope 
borne in upon him in the solitude of prayer. 
Then, having seen what God is doing in the 
opportunities and questions of his day, he gives 
himself with utter self-abandon to working the 
work of God. He knows that God can will 
nothing but the best ; so he tolerates nothing 
in himself but the highest ideals of duty and 
character. He doubts not that the righteous 
will of God must ultimately prevail, and joy- 
ously endures temporal losses for righteousness* 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. 67 

sake. If he must lose the comfort and civiliza- 
tion of Ur of Chaldea, he fears not that God 
will provide something better than Ur for him- 
self and his children. So he casts in his lot 
with God, without asking to know what that 
lot may be. 

Hence the man of faith does not ask what is 
the safe course for him to take. He who seeks 
to do no more than what is considered safe, 
even in a religious way, is destitute of the 
power of faith. He may, in a sense, be a good 
man, beautiful in many attributes of character ; 
but he is not among those who put to flight the 
armies of aliens, and quench the fires of wicked- 
ness, and work the constructive righteousness 
of God into the fabrics of history. No man 
has faith to succeed in any cause who is not 
ready to face worldly failure, and endure the 
defeat of his cause ; willing even to find him- 
self mistaken, if he may thereby get at the 
heart of the eternal realities. 

He may be a man imperfect, not so fair to 
look upon as the man at his side who walks by 
calculation and sight, but yet a man whose be- 



68 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

lief in God allows him to make no terms with 
his imperfections. He sees great gaps between 
his faith and his practice, and is agonized with 
the shame of his weakness. Torn with vain 
climbing ; sick with baffled effort ; gaining a 
little here, and there backward swept by sudden 
passion ; mangled upon the rocks of pride, from 
which gush no healing springs of sympathy ; 
the soul of faith yet presses on, undismayed by 
failure, fearing no foes. He has more faith in 
the power of God than in the impotence of his 
own weakness. He has given himself into the 
keeping of the will of God, and knows that 
goodness alone will endure in his life at last, if 
he let God keep him. 

Thus it is not by faith in his own poor power 
that the lonely prophet of faith moves out from 
the trodden paths of life and thought, from the 
midst of a conceited civilization, in a self-satis- 
fied age without a spiritual vision ; but by faith 
in the omnipotent reign of the redeeming Lord 
God. Not because he feels himself better than 
others — he may know himself as the chief of 
sinners — does the man of faith throw down 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. 69 

the gauntlet of challenge before the time-hon- 
ored walls of sin, and bid their jeering hosts a 
joyous defiance ; but because he feels the grasp 
of the Almighty hand upon his life, and hears 
the commanding whisper of the Eternal Word 
in his soul. An overmastering consciousness 
of God, swallowing up the sense of weakness 
and all self-consciousness, makes his belief 
forceful amidst the forceless and unvital reli- 
gious conventionalism that sits in self-appointed 
judgment on his words and work. God is with 
him, working with his hands, walking on his 
feet, pouring infinite thoughts into his brain, 
speaking with his mouth, loving with his heart, 
possessing and empowering all his faculties, 
directing all his energies. It is this tremen- 
dous conviction that he is working with God, 
that God has moved in and pitched his tent in 
his soul, that makes a man's belief count for 
righteousness. It is this that enables God to 
stake the eternal interests of his kingdom on 
the faith of some poor and sinful human soul. 
It is this that lifts hands of faith to reach 
across the ages and make the moral wealth of 



*JO A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

the future the inheritance of the present. This 
it is that makes wise saints of illiterate sinners, 
while cultured religionists stand dumb and 
ashamed. This it is that calls forth praises 
from the mouths of babes in knowledge, while 
its masters stare in unsympathetic wonderment. 
By this faith the weak things of the world bring 
low the things that are strong, and the blunder- 
ing enthusiast does the mighty work of God, 
while prudent conservatism declares him a 
destroyer of religion. The consciousness of 
God is the power of faith, and surrender to 
God is its essence. Faith is the source of all 
righteousness, and righteousness alone can be 
its fruit. For nothing but righteousness can 
faith be reckoned to any soul. Faith is itself 
the absolute righteousness. Men are as great 
and righteous in the eternal course of things 
as their faith. Righteousness is wrought in 
the world by men whose lives are one con- 
densed belief in God. 

Abraham believed God ; and his faith is bear- 
ing fruit in earth-wide and eternal harvests of 
righteousness, filling the earth with the knowl- 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. 7 1 

edge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. 
Moses believed God ; and his belief is yet fash- 
ioning human institutions after the mind of 
God. Elijah believed God; and in the secret 
of Elijah's praying-places God formed new- 
epochs of history. David believed God; and 
the Spirit breathed into his sinful soul celestial 
songs of deathless hopes. Daniel believed 
God ; and by the hand of the captive Jew God 
started the earth upon a new career. Paul be- 
lieved God; and watch him as he goes from 
nation to nation, striding the earth like the 
moral colossus that he is ; before his advance 
the work of armies is undone, walls of partition 
crumble between man and man, gates of brass 
swing open, thrones topple, and a new Europe 
leaps from the ruins Rome has wrought of a 
race's liberties. John believed God ; and down 
into his self-emptied soul was poured the fulness 
of God's mind, so that he writes the words of 
God to centuries far distant, and writes as never 
the pen of man has written. Calvin, the timid 
scholar, believed God; and God made him the 
bulwark of freedom against which the wrath of 



*]2 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

unrighteousness and the judgments of hypoc- 
risy could not prevail. Cromwell believed God ; 
and look at him, a pious and wrathful English 
farmer, muttering against tyranny and popery, 
brooding over his Bible while sin revels in 
church and rules the state. While he prays 
and grumbles, somehow God's omnipotence gets 
down inside of that farmer, and when he girds 
on his sword for his dreadful work, the earth 
quakes beneath his tread, and hell is helpless to 
stop him ; he makes the Anglo-Saxon with his 
Bible the master of the world. Edwards, the 
metaphysician and poet, believed God ; and the 
awakened church put on new garments of life 
that now shine into the uttermost islands of the 
sea. And what shall I say more ? Time would 
fail me to tell of Luther and Wesley ; of Eng- 
land's Alfred and America's Lincoln; of a great 
multitude of whom only God has noted, who 
through great tribulation, through sorrow and 
shedding of blood, have by faith wrought right- 
eousness, subdued kingdoms, obtained promises, 
out of weakness been made strong. Great hosts 
of unnamed witnesses, of whom the world was 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. Jl 

not worthy, adjure us to run with patience the 
race of faith that is set before us, looking unto 
Jesus, the author and perfecterof our faith, who 
for the joy of doing the will of God and serving 
his brethren endured the cross of self-renunci- 
ation, despised the shame of worldly failure, 
and now sits on the right hand of our Father's 
glory. 

There has been no day in Christian history 
which offered the opportunity for heroism of 
faith that Christ sets before our day and church. 
In no age of redemption has our Christ called 
so urgently for men who believe God. We live 
in a time of unbelief ; not unbelief in the 
existence of God; not unbelief in the fact 
of religion ; but unbelief in the practicability 
of righteousness. Theology presumes that 
righteousness cannot be actualized upon the 
earth. The church does not believe that men 
can do as the Lord Jesus tells them. The so- 
ciety that calls itself Christian believes in 
neither the wisdom nor the authority of the Ser- 
mon on the Mount. The notion that God will 
accept opinion in the place of obedience is the 



74 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

strong delusion that is leading Christendom into 
living a stupendous lie. Unbelief in righteousness 
is the most vicious unbelief in God. To suppose 
that God can be satisfied with less than his own 
goodness in humanity is to suppose God less 
than perfectly good himself. To proceed with 
human life on the presumption that the gospel 
of God commands us to be and do what is im- 
possible is the most fatal infidelity the church 
has ever had to meet ; and it meets it within its 
own precincts. The cherishing of low ideals of 
duty and character is the very substance of 
unbelief. There is no atheism so frightful in 
its consequences to the age, so troublesome to 
the throne of God, so anarchical an element in 
the universe, as the conclusion that Christliness 
of character is inconsistent with the manage- 
ment of the earthly affairs of man. It would 
be better in the sight of God that every creed 
should become a scandal, and every house of 
worship a heap of ruins, than that men should 
accept selfishness as the law of human activi- 
ties. For God is able to enter doors of faith, 
to fill the innermost recesses of our being, and 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. 75 

master the minutest details of our activities, 
and glorify himself in all we think and do. It 
is because unbelief closes these doors of faith 
that the earth has waited so long and sadly for 
God to dwell with man in unbroken communion, 
making the race his untroubled people. It can 
be through naught but unbelief that the church 
of Christ shall fail to lead the sons of men into 
the promised land of brotherhood, now beckon- 
ing the church to a new career and undreamed- 
of triumph. 

We are in the early beginnings of a recon- 
structive epoch. The light of a great day of 
God is breaking upon the hill-tops of faith, and 
streaking the social horizon, and piercing the 
gloom of want which sits long and heavy upon 
the valleys of toil. There is a feeling abroad 
in the world, daily deepening into an impatient 
conviction, that Christ is pressing upon a reluc- 
tant church the key of love that can unlock the 
problems of society. The prophetic hearts of 
our age, broken with a great hope for man 
which could find no response in rationalistic 
orthodoxy, are turning anew to the living 



J 6 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

Christ of the Gospels, and are rejoicing in 
the healing touch of his sympathy. The race 
is grasping a thought of redemption which 
means righteousness and peace, justice and 
brotherhood, and the bearing of the burdens 
of the weak by the strong. Without the 
temple wait the multitudes, eager to crown 
the slain Christ whom the scribes and Phari- 
sees may again cast out, and follow him even 
unto death in the victory of faith that over- 
cometh the world. 

When I meet the sin of the world in its most 
woful forms ; when I marvel at our blind and 
growing faith in money as the solvent of 
earth's ills ; when I speak to the deaf ears of 
religious pride, and behold a nation mistaking 
steam whistles and opera houses for progress, 
and towering temples of trade and palaces of 
domestic luxury for national prosperity ; when 
I see the smiling indifference of the fashionable 
few who cluster about the splendid churches, 
while the great unloved peoples, daily growing 
in numbers and poverty and vice, are asking 
fateful questions about right and wrong which 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. *]>J 

the church does not answer ; when I see the 
Almighty hand gathering lightnings of destruc- 
tion in the heavens to let loose upon the strong- 
holds of mammon ; — then a strong agony cries 
out in my soul for men who believe God. Be 
they soever poor and ignorant, sinful and ob- 
scure, let me clasp hands, O God, with men who 
discern the signs of the times ; men who see 
thy beckoning stars of promise, who hear some- 
thing of what thou art saying to this material- 
loving age, who rejoice to cast in their lot with 
thee, sharing in the sorrow and glory of fulfill- 
ing thy righteousness ! Up and down the world 
of strife and work the Christ of judgment is 
moving, appealing for hearts that do believe 
that the will of God may yet be done on earth 
as it is done in heaven. He calls for men who 
are willing to endure the loss of money and 
fling reputation to the winds, that they may 
work with God for the creation of a Christian 
society and a heavenly civilization. 

The straightening-out of the social ills of the 
world could be speedily accomplished, if men 
who profess the gospel would take the mission 



?8 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

of establishing the market on a gospel foundation 
as a serious and practicable mission. It is a 
sheer want of faith that keeps this sublime work 
from being done in the name of the Lord Jesus. 
If the Christian business men of our day, who 
know the gospel and know the commands of our 
Lord, would take it as the purpose of their lives 
to make all their business relations a revelation 
of the practicability of the gospel, dealing with 
their fellow-men according to the gospel rule of 
doing to others as if they themselves were the 
others ; if they would take hold of this great 
determination to Christianize the business of 
the world, and make brothers of men, with the 
equally strong determination never to let go, 
come what may ; — then they could work the 
greatest reform, they could bring in the divinest 
era, ever known to history. If there were a 
thousand souls ready to fling themselves, like 
Abraham, upon the tides of their divinest 
instincts, without asking to see whither they 
would bear them, and follow Christ in the deep 
and wide sense of the apostles, there would be 
such a heaving-up of this world as would lift the 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. 79 

loftiest ranges of its life into the skies ; and 
the warrior angels of Christ would descend to 
join the climbing saints in battle for the ever- 
lasting triumph of righteousness. 

I understand that, looking at the matter of 
absolute self-dedication to the work of God in 
one way, there seems little encouragement to 
inspire the single life. Every social and religi- 
ous convulsion that has destroyed the old and 
brought forth a new earth has crushed and 
buried the prophets of the better day. The 
world has always mocked the faces which 
brightest shone with new revelations of truth, 
and pierced the hands that came to it laden 
with God's new gifts of life. Idle seems the 
dream of social righteousness to so large a part 
of those who name Christ as their Redeemer, 
while with cynical indifference the bloody feet 
of covetousness tramp on their way of woe. 
The amazing moral ignorance of the rich 
sickens us with the sad intellectual ignorance 
of the poor. Hypocrisy and injustice and des- 
potism seem to die only for a resurrection in 
some finer and more deceptive form. By none 



80 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

is the actual kingdom of Christ more bitterly 
antagonized than the zealous religious classes, 
while, — 

" Still on the highroad, 'neath the noon-day sun, 
The fires of hate are lit for those who dare 
Follow their Lord along the untrodden way." 

Of small power seems a single life of self-denial 
amidst the wide and desolate wastes of selfish- 
ness. What can a few souls, confronting a 
great infidel church supremely anxious to keep 
on good terms with the world and conserve the 
traditions of the elders, — what can they do to 
give the gospel back to men ? And the doubt 
is intensified by the delay that hopes for some 
organization to arise to do the work which only 
consecrated hearts and loving hands and sacri- 
ficial lives can do. The Roman trust in com- 
prehensive organization and Anglo-Saxon faith 
in the opinion of majorities have obscured from 
the eyes of our American Christianity the 
majestic simplicity of the gospel methods of 
our Lord. 

The kingdom has always come through the 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. 8 1 

faith of the consecrated few. Great institutions 
and organizations have nearly always come to 
plant themselves squarely across the march of 
the divine purposes. By the consecration of 
single souls, and small groups of souls, has 
righteousness been increasing with the ages. 
By the few listening spirits have God's great 
thoughts been spoken ; and the few obedient 
lives have wrought the heavenly doing of his 
will in the earth's epochal hours. The race 
has entered its holier eras of wider freedom and 
purer justice at the heels of humble and patient 
souls whom it scoffed while it followed. It is 
the majesty of simple goodness in single char- 
acters that reveals God in converting and con- 
quering power to the world. By no other 
organization than the fellowship which each 
man finds while walking the path of obedience 
to the will of God can the world be altogether 
overcome, and the dream of world-wide brother- 
hood become an eternal fact. " If the single 
man," says Emerson, speaking according to the 
gospel, " plant himself indomitably upon his 
divine instincts, and there abide, the huge world 
will come round to him." 



82 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

We none of us need wait, in this day of 
human need and divine judgment, for company 
and organization. We need no program of 
action save the words of our Lord, sending us, 
as he was sent by the Father, to please not our- 
selves, but give our lives as bread and meat to 
a hungry world. There is no thinking, no esti- 
mating, here, what the most infirm and fettered 
of us each may be and do for God and man if 
we but make of ourselves living sacrifices in 
his service, to be conformed to Christ and not 
the opinions and customs of time. We may 
each, acting with the apostolic faith in the 
power of love and truth, pentecosted with the 
apostolic enthusiasm for righteousness, send 
out divine influences that will submerge vast 
intrenchments of evil and bear the race far 
Godward in their sweep. If we but put faith 
in the noiseless voice that speaks in the deeps 
of our being, rather than the lifeless artificiali- 
ties of society and the hard selfishness of the 
market, we may translate the divinest ideals of 
life and conduct into common-place realities. 
If we trust the light within us more than the 



THE REALITY OF FAITH. 83 

darkness without us, our holiest dreams may 
become the most substantial facts of our ex- 
perience. The Christ who calls us to enter 
and share his life and work with God is him- 
self the power by which we overcome the evil 
of the world, and face the scorn of its bruising 
customs. Arise, let us go hence to cast our 
crowns at the feet of the sovereign Christ and 
share in the toil and tribulation, the patience 
and triumph, of his coming kingdom. And he 
will write upon us his own name, and make us 
pillars in the earth-enclosing temple of love, 
which is the New Jerusalem coming down out 
of heaven from God. 



IV. 

THE FAITH THAT OVERCOMETH 
THE WORLD. 



It has been sometimes said of late years that Christianity 
has resigned the leadership of the world, and that the friends 
of humanity must now step in to act as a natural Providence 
and conduct the affairs of the race. There is some truth in 
the complaint, whatever we may think of the proposed remedy. 
For there has been at all times a tendency among Christians 
to abandon the claim of universal sovereignty which was at 
first made in the name of the Lord. The claim may be made 
in words, but left in a purely ideal state ; and when no attempt 
has been made to give it a practical application, it is in effect 
abandoned. A Christianity which embraces a part of human 
life, while it adjourns its fuller claim to the world beyond the 
grave, is certainly not the religion of One who says, "All 
power is given unto me in heaven and in earth." — Canon Fre- 
mantle. 

Religion does not permeate life. The Church is one of the 
great institutions of the country, and gets its own place. But 
it is a thing apart from the common life, which goes on beside 
it. Business, politics, literature, amusements, are only faintly 
colored by it. Yet the mission of Christianity is not to occupy 
a respectable place apart, but to leaven life through and through. 
— Dr. James Stalker. 

In fact, the godless lover of gain, and the gainless lover of 
God are fanatics both, taking hold of the opposite ends of the 
same falsehood. And the truth which suffices to rebuke them 
both is this : that the kingdom of God is not a business, set up 
in rivalry with worldly business ; but a divine law regulating, 
and a divine temper pervading, the pursuits of worldly busi- 
ness. — Dr. Ja??ies Martineau. 

There is but one thing needful — to possess God. All our 
senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external re- 
sources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many 
modes of tasting and adoring God. We must learn to detach 
ourselves from all that is capable of being lost; to bind our- 
selves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to 
enjoy the rest as a loan. — AmieVs Journal. 



S6 



THE FAITH THAT OVERCOMETH 
THE WORLD. 

Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth 
that Jesus is the Son of God ? — i John v. 5. 

It was not by reliance on any visible support 
the apostles went forth to claim the world for 
Christ. They could count upon no earthly re- 
sources. The institutions of man were against 
them. They were opposed by governments, 
schools of learning, and established religions. 
Nothing seemed more foolish and hopeless to 
the world than the assertion of the kingship of 
Christ, who left his disciples without an inch 
of worldly standing-ground, without a thread of 
earthly dependence to which they could cling. 
They had no temples of worship ; no philosophy, 
or system of theology ; no literature, save some 
of the books of the Old Testament. They 
were without social position or political influ- 
ence, without wealth or the friendship of 
87 



88 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

wealth. The kingdoms of the world and their 
glory, which had once filled so large a place in 
the ambitions of the apostles, were a vanished 
dream when Peter and John began to proclaim 
the crucified Christ as the living King of heaven 
and earth. There was never such a congestion 
of human helplessness as the hundred and 
twenty men and women who met in that upper 
chamber at Jerusalem, to wait for the reception 
of the unseen power that was to make their 
deeds mighty and their words convincing. 

Nor was it by faith in superior intellectual 
gifts the disciples did their work. Christ left 
no educated ministry, according to our interpre- 
tation of education. Peter and John were un- 
lettered fishermen. And the epistles of Paul 
show a sublime unconsciousness of the great 
theological problems which have occupied the 
scholars of the church. Humanity, and not 
theology, was the apostolic burden. The 
change of the centre of Christian thought 
from the sphere of righteousness to the sphere 
of metaphysics, coming after the apostles' time, 
was a corruption of Christianity ; a compro- 



THE FAITH THAT OVERCOME TH. 89 

mise of the gospel with the sceptical philosophy 
of a pagan world. The fixing of the attention 
of Christendom upon opinion rather than upon 
character, the occupation of the Christian intel- 
lect with definitions rather than with righteous- 
ness, levelled the Christian ministry to the 
authority of the scribes of traditionalism, whom 
Christ rebuked with unqualified severity. The 
putting of theology in the place of life as the 
object of Christian concern was a victory for 
the devil, and an utter perversion of the mind 
of the gospel. The early Christian churches 
were composed, in the main, of the poor and 
ignorant. The epistles of the New Testament 
were written, the greatest of them, to bond- 
servants. Paul, one of the most accomplished 
men of all times, speaks with intense distrust 
of the intellectual graces which were so highly 
prized in his day, and are so strangely and 
sadly over-valued in ours. The great apostle 
felt keenly the degradation of being taken for 
a mere religious orator. He saw that the cen- 
tres of culture were seats of refined and shame- 
less vice. John, too, saw the moral stupidity 



90 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

of even the best philosophy. All the apostles 
fought with the beasts of theological selfish- 
ness, and bore the stripes of religious big- 
otry. They knew the uselessness of contending 
against the blindness and meanness of the pro- 
fessional religionist, who enthrones the idol of 
his system in the place of the living God. At 
one time and another, the apostles also dealt 
with that moral drivelling which characterizes 
all mere intellectual culture. Not by the wis- 
dom of the world, religious or philosophical, 
any more than by the world's institutions, did 
they expect to win the world to their King. 
They were no cultivated religious gentlemen, 
reading the literature of the day and writing 
proper religious essays in well-appointed studies. 
Neither by faith in their own righteousness 
were they victorious in their labors. They 
knew they had been childish and selfish, fickle 
and false. They saw themselves as sinners, 
along with all mankind. They felt in fellow- 
ship with the most wretched and fallen. They 
regarded themselves as miracles of mercy. 
Continued self - acquaintance only increased 



THE FAITH THAT OVER COMETH 9 1 

their self-abasement, and their wonder at the 
gracious love that saved them. Not because 
they thought themselves better than other men 
were they enabled and encouraged to go as 
ambassadors of righteousness and truth to the 
nations. Better than any of us, I fear, they 
felt the waste and weakness of sin. Through 
great sinning and great suffering they learned 
the lessons of redemption. 

The faith by which the apostles overcame 
the world was in their acceptance of the abso- 
lute authority of Jesus Christ over all human 
life. In the faith that God had revealed him- 
self in Christ as a deliverer from every form 
of sin they toiled in the divine might of a 
redeemed manhood. By faith in Christ as the 
manifested power and revealed wisdom of God 
they cut loose from bondage to the past, and 
swung clear of dependence on visible supports 
and earthly resources. To them God was 
no condescending Christless infinity, but a 
heavenly Father who had shown forth his 
entire character and spoken his whole word 
in Christ. In the light and joy of this revela- 



92 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

tion they suffered and worked with Christ as 
the conqueror of all things visible and invisible. 
They were the devoted subjects of a King 
who was making a new earth in which he 
would reign in righteousness. The race was 
redeemed ; sin had no more right to dominion 
over men ; since the revelation of God in 
Christ there was no more excuse for abiding 
in unrighteousness. Christ had overcome the 
world ; to him the nations belonged ; his 
Spirit was subjecting them unto God; he was 
the Ruler of the kings of earth — the apostles 
were the proclaimers of this fact. To the 
apostles redemption was a reality. There was 
in the coming of Christ an influx of moral 
power sufficient to deliver the world from all 
wickedness, making covetousness and selfish- 
ness, lust and strife, unnecessary. In the faith 
that Christ who had been slain was living and 
reigning, that he was surely conquering the 
world for the Father who had given it into his 
hands, the apostles were bold and tireless in 
announcing the fact that the world was re- 
deemed from the power, not the consequences, 



THE FAITH THAT OVERCOME Tff. 93 

of sin. They believed they were fighting the 
good fight of a victorious Christ, and that 
henceforth human history would be the realiza- 
tion of the fruits of his redemption in the es- 
tablishment of his everlasting kingdom. Under 
the kingship of the Christ of all grace and 
truth, righteousness was no longer an experi- 
ment ; human life was a triumph, and not a 
defeat ; right and wrong were not problems ; 
the world was redeemed with a complete re- 
demption ; only unbelief could regard any sin, 
personal or social, as irremovable. 

It was thus impossible for the apostles to 
sustain any other relation to the right than 
that of triumphantly asserting it in the name of 
their king ; or hold any other relation to the 
wrong than that of smiting it by the same 
authority. They were not engaged in any 
doubtful struggle. They could conceive of no 
possibility of defeat. They were the followers 
of One before whom nothing could stand. They 
never considered that the issue of their labors 
and sorrows, their prayers and faith, could be 
less than the subjection of all human life to the 



94 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

rule of Christ. From the day his Spirit armed 
them for service they maintained an unchanging 
attitude of triumph. An unbroken strain of 
victory is borne along from apostle to apostle 
through the writings of the New Testament. 
They attacked the world as men who were 
victors from the outset. In the faith that the 
uplifting of Christ was the mortal blow to the 
dominion of Satan ; that the resurrection of 
Christ revealed death as a gain and not a loss ; 
that the coming of the Spirit was the spreading 
forth of the power of Christ to gather all 
kingdoms and governments, all families and 
societies, all knowledge and commerce, under 
the eternal sovereignty of love ; — in this faith 
they toiled and endured as seeing the invisible 
Christ already on the throne of universal do- 
minion. In this faith they rejoiced in persecu- 
tions, and lifted voices of thanksgiving from 
prison-walls and martyr-fires. They received 
the blows of the Lord's enemies in the faith 
that every blow weakened the power of evil 
and hastened the world's deliverance. They 
believed that the truth which the world re- 



THE FAITH THAT OVERCOMETH. 95 

jected in them as falsehood would be welcomed 
by ages to come as a precious inheritance. 
They suffered the loss of all things that coming 
generations might be enriched by faith's sacri- 
fices. They were blinded by no blasphemous 
separation of the world into secular and spirit- 
ual spheres ; fettered by no restrictions of the 
power of Christ's redemptive grace or the 
authority of his sovereign love. They had 
not betrayed Christ to philosophers by aban- 
doning the gospel for systems of theology ; 
nor exchanged the weapons of faith and love 
for the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 
They dared not think of any evil under the 
sun as other than a defeated alien, a retreating 
enemy. Faith in Christ as immanent and 
sovereign in all human affairs, not faith in any 
power in themselves, not faith in the favors or 
resources of the world, was the might by which 
the apostles worked out the salvation of a 
redeemed race. By no other quality of faith 
can the church overcome the world. 

Sometimes I ask myself whether the Son of 
man, as he comes in the crises and opportuni- 



g6 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

ties of our age, finds faith in the church — the 
faith that overcometh the world ; the faith that 
Christ has redeemed the world. The question 
cannot be answered by the number of Bibles 
printed and read ; for no faith is vital and con- 
quering that depends mainly for its knowledge 
of God on written records. As Andrew Mur- 
ray says, " There may be a study and knowledge 
of the word in which there is but little real 
fellowship with the living God." Our Father is 
a God of the living as well as of the dead. He 
is not dumb nor speechless, save to unbelief. 
Inspiration is quenchless, revelation continuous. 
Nor can the quality and quantity of faith be 
measured by the number and beauty of our 
churches. God dwelleth not alone in temples 
made with hands. There cometh in Christ one 
greater than our temples of material splendor, 
which are monuments to human pride quite as 
much as to a living faith. We all know, if we 
are candid, that some magnificent temples of 
worship are built to shut out rather than gather 
in the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Social 
caste has, in too many instances, more to do 



THE FAITH THAT OVER COMETH 97 

with the erection of palaces of worship than 
faith in Christ. And God cares not for 
churches which have not in them the mind 
which was in Christ Jesus. There is a wide 
distinction to be made between religious re- 
spectability and the love for humanity which 
is the spirit and power of the gospel. Christ 
does not measure a church's faith by the beauty 
of its adornments, nor the ecclesiastical promi- 
nence of its preacher, but by the attitude. of 
the church towards a world of sin and need. 
By love alone can a church vindicate its right 
to bear the name of the crucified Christ. By 
this shall all men know that ye are my disci- 
ples, if ye have love one to another. Is the 
church doing the same work that Christ did, its 
members making themselves of no reputation, 
and going about doing good in the power of the 
Holy Spirit ? A church has faith only to the 
degree that the church is CJirist to its community. 
Neither do our creeds evidence the reality of 
our belief. Opinions about Christ, orthodox or 
unorthodox, are not faith in Christ. Not in 
these does the Son of man look for faith. 



98 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

They are no part of the gospel, and are totally 
foreign to the spirit of the apostles. No one 
would have resented them more vehemently 
than Paul. The cataloguing of God's attributes 
as the symbol of Christian faith is a triumph of 
heathen philosophy. Orthodox symbols are 
often the refuge of the most substantial athe- 
ism, the most godless covetousness, and impu- 
dent infidelity. And Christianity must be 
lifted out of the realm of metaphysics and put 
down again in the realm of morals. The seat 
of religious judgment must shift from opinion 
to character. For while the church has busied 
itself with definitions, throwing itself into 
panics over supposed intellectual errors, fla- 
grant moral errors and infidel practices have 
grown up under the protection of the most 
pretentious orthodoxy. While distracting itself 
over the unknown program of moral procedure 
in another world, the church has practically 
abandoned the ethics of the Sermon on the 
Mount, which is God's program of moral pro- 
cedure in this. Nor yet the mere number of 
religious industries, or benevolent activities, 



THE FAITH THAT OVERCOMETH. 99 

or charitable endowments, which we record, 
can in themselves prove our faith. They may 
be objects of faith and worship rather than the 
living God. There is a measureless amount of 
religious activity and churchliness which is not 
Christian, and has no vital relation to the gos- 
pel. " This is the work of God, that ye believe 
on him whom he hath sent." There is also a 
vast deal of modern benevolence, flattering 
indeed to a world-won church, which is noth- 
ing less than a hard-hearted apology for cruelty, 
extortion, and robbery. 

Our Christian faith can be measured only by 
the quality of our self-surrender. No faith is 
vital which does not supply itself with virtue. 
That faith is a fiction which does not fruit in 
self-sacrifice and righteousness. We believe 
in Christ just to the measure we give ourselves 
up to him, walking in his way of life, guided by 
his truth, obeying his law of love, going about 
doing good in the spirit and power of his holi- 
ness. It is the faith that leaves one no more 
his own man, but Christ's man ; the faith that 
puts no conditions in the surrender of self to 



100 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

the mastership of Christ ; the faith that counts 
temporal losses as eternal gains, that it may 
know Christ and live his life ; the faith that 
rests not upon the friendship of the world, nor 
upon any formula of truth, but on Christ as 
the power and wisdom of God ; the faith that 
conforms the life to Christ, and not to the 
fashions of social selfishness ; the faith that 
nails the whole being in grateful self-surrender 
on the cross of the slain Christ. Faith never 
reaches far beyond self-renunciation. And the 
moment we are self-surrendered to Christ, with 
all the passions of life attached to him as the 
supreme object of affection and sacrifice, and 
the supreme joy of aspiration, that moment we 
enter the freedom, and share in the life, and 
work with the strength of God. Life is hence- 
forth a victory. We then work with our eyes 
on Christ, looking not at self, working most and 
best when all thoughts of success and failure 
are absorbed in the faith that Christ has re- 
deemed the world. The soul that is bound to 
Christ by this faith works on, faithful alike in 
victory and defeat, knowing that he whose 



THE FAITH THAT OVERCOME Tff. IOI 

world this is conquers with failure as well as 
success. It broods not over its own weakness, 
nor faints at the sorrow of baffled effort ; nor 
does its energy fail in the presence of strong 
and confident evils. Through Christ, in Christ, 
with Christ, it overcomes the world. The 
Christ-possessed soul walks the world of storms 
serene and omnipotent, tossed not about upon 
the waves of opinion, nor distracted by the 
babble of voices. It has cast its anchor in the 
secret place of the Most High, the harbor of 
eternal hope where Jesus is, and abides without 
fear till the clouds of time shall break from the 
face of God. 

Christ is all that God can make of man. In 
him is the righteousness of God which is the 
search of history. In him is the complete mani- 
festation of God's love and power in humanity. 
By faith in him is the race to be made whole. 
Not in barren ethical abstractions, which have 
no ground in reality ; not in theological formu- 
las, which are the unbelief of logic ; but in per- 
sonal devotion to Jesus Christ is the purifying 
power of the world, and the secret of man's 



102 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

moral development. In the hand of Jesus is 
the key to human history. Faith in him as the 
destiny of man and the revelation of the Father 
is the hope that shall make us perfect as our 
Father in heaven is perfect. The race will ad- 
vance in righteousness, and enter its eternal 
rest from strife, as fast and fully as it accepts 
Christ as ruler. Nothing greater than Christ, 
neither in institutions nor in doctrines, can 
man think for personal guidance or social law. 
When the earth yields allegiance to the law of 
love in Christ it will be Eden-clad again. The 
spirit of Christ must be the spirit of commerce, 
of politics, of society. The complete reforma- 
tion of the world, the reconstruction of society, 
the saving of the Christless multitudes, will 
come through the acceptance of the mastership 
of Jesus on the part of the church that bears 
his name. There are no social problems in fact. 
They exist only in the imagination of unbelief. 
Every problem of your life and mine, every 
problem of government and finance, every prob- 
lem of capital and labor, will find quick and 
simple solution when men who call Christ their 



THE FAITH THAT OVERCOME TH. 103 

Lord are willing to obey his commands. There 
is not a single question, individual or universal, 
that cannot find its final and philosophic answer 
through belief in Jesus as the Son of God and 
King of men. We have but one thing to do to 
right the wrongs of the world ; and that is, to 
submit ourselves, in every sphere of life, to the 
authority of Christ, and exalt him as the King 
whose right it is to reign in every domain of 
human activity. By enslavement to Christ is 
the race to be made free. He is the righteous- 
ness for which the world sorrows and waits. 
He is God's spoken word concerning right and 
wrong. He is the truth for which wise fools 
search in vain ; the truth which God is raising 
in a new resurrection from beneath the debris 
of centuries of conflict. When all human life 
comes to be lived out under the authority of 
Jesus, it will then be rightly lived. Through 
union with Christ in God will all the ills of the 
divine body of humanity be healed. Through 
the lifting up of the Son of man with our own 
pierced hands of faith will the race be drawn 
into the nightless light of the throne of love. 



104 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

All the power of God unto salvation is in Christ, 
who has overcome the world and redeemed it 
unto God, seeing that his divine power hath 
granted unto us all things that pertain unto life 
and godliness. 

The problems of our times are demanding of 
the church a larger and more apostolic concep- 
tion of redemption. The hungry millions with- 
out the church, stretching forth worn hands of 
hope, are beseeching us to know if good be 
stronger than evil, and love mightier than 
greed. There is a feeling moving in the world, 
deepening into a terrible suspicion, that Christ 
is not fairly represented by his church; that 
we have been regarding Christ as a Saviour in 
our sins instead of from our sins. Too long 
have we been limiting the power of the Son 
of God in the interests of churchly selfish- 
ness and dogmatic theology. The social ques- 
tions of the day are the notes of God's 
trumpet calling the church to a new career. 
The church must answer the call, and manifest 
Christianity to the world as a divinely human 
brotherhood, or bring upon itself some terrible 



THE FAITH THAT OVERCOMETH. 105 

judgment that will level its temples to the dust, 
and make its creeds a derision. It must form 
a larger estimate of the riches that God has 
treasured in Christ, waiting to lavish them 
upon a recipient world. 

The world has long heard from theology that 
it is condemned. The divine fact which needs 
to be uttered with prophetic emphasis upon the 
earth in our day is the reality of redemption. 
Society must be told that there has been given 
unto men in Christ a power great enough to 
deliver them from the law of selfishness. Re- 
demption is a fact, and not an imputation or a 
fiction. The cleansing powers of the blood of 
Christ are moral and actual. We have no 
excuse for abiding in unrighteousness. Covet- 
ousness is atheism ; the supremacy of the law 
of self-interest is infidelity ; social caste is pro- 
fanity. God forbid that we should continue in 
these sins any longer, blaspheming God with 
the delusion that grace may abound through 
our unrighteousness; for thereby we trample 
under foot the precious blood of Christ, and 
neglect to our peril his great salvation. And 



106 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

how can the church escape if it neglects to 
work out the salvation of Jesus in a regenerated 
society ? 

I speak not, my brethren, in the interests of 
any theology, old or new. I speak in the name 
of the living Christ, for the sake of the church 
which bears his name, and for the sake of a 
travailing earth that waits for us to stand forth 
and show ourselves to be indeed the sons of 
God. I feel that we need to free ourselves 
from all fear of men, and all bondage to human 
traditionalism, that we may get very low at the 
feet of the suffering Christ, and ask him to 
show us what his gospel really is, and what its 
message is to our day and generation. It is 
time that judgment begin at the house of God. 
To be the messengers of judgment will cost us 
much. But we can afford the cost, if we may 
do our part towards starting the church upon a 
career which will restore Christianity to Chris- 
tendom, and give back the gospel to men. May 
the Spirit of all holiness and power fill us with 
that divine discontent which will not let us rest 
in the pride and injustice of the present order 



THE FAITH THAT OVERCOMETH 107 

of things, but move us into the future as bearers 
of the reproach of Christ, and seekers of that 
coming city of God, whose wall of peace shall 
enclose the nations and shut out all darkness 
forever. 

In the flashes of divine judgment that rift 
the clouds which darkly gather on the horizon 
of the church, beyond the idolatry of a mam- 
mon-serving age, through the smoke of speed- 
ing conflicts, out of the ashes of dreadful ruins, 
I see a scourged and purified church returning 
to the faith of the apostles, its torn and trampled 
robes stripped of worldly adornments and new- 
washed in the blood of the slain Lamb. It 
may be a church of the remnant, desolate and 
crippled, but a church repentant and triumphant 
through faith in the Son of God as the ruler of 
the kings of earth. In that ransomed church, 
delivered from the kingdoms of the world and 
their glory, no throne of mammon shall stand 
beside the cross of the crucified Christ. It will 
bear the cross about in loving hearts, bleeding 
with the love of God for fallen men, and lean 
no more upon fashion and wealth. It will point 



108 A PLEA FOR THE GOSPEL. 

no more to wordy symbols and material mag- 
nificence as the witnesses of its faith, but to 
lives of Christly righteousness. It will be led 
by brave souls who will bring their all to the 
feet of Christ, in the faith that his cross of 
self-renunciation is the only practicable law 
of human society. And though the world 
may mock them as fools, they will overcome 
through the blood of the Lamb, loving not 
their lives unto death, and lead the race through 
the gates of the New Jerusalem, which is a 
righteous civilization coming down out of 
heaven from God, linking all human life in an 
everlasting fellowship of love. Then children 
shall be no more the accidents of lust, but the 
offspring of prayer, and every human occupa- 
tion shall be a communion with God, and the 
strong shall bear the burdens of the weak, and 
there shall not be any more pain, and the king- 
dom of our God shall have come with power. 



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ftfioma* g, Crotoell & Co., ne ^o y s°t r o k n and 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2008 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 
1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



